The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist

by Radley Balko

  In a 2015 interview with the Columbus Dispatch, Allgood said he believed drug charges were a good way to lock up criminals who had committed other, more serious crimes but were too savvy to get caught. That philosophy of locking up “bad guys” even if the crimes for which they’re charged aren’t the crimes for which they’re most culpable—or perhaps even culpable at all—may help explain how Allgood could seem indifferent when confronted with the possibility that he had convicted the wrong person.

  Those who have worked with and against Allgood over the years say he has a formidable intellect. “I always got the sense that he was a bright guy,” de Gruy says. “If he had gone into commercial or corporate law, I have no doubt that he’d have been successful at it.”

  That sort of praise raises a broader question about prosecutors in Mississippi: whether they were really so easily persuaded by Hayne and West—and West in particular—or if they were really persuaded at all. Perhaps it isn’t that they couldn’t see through some of the more absurd claims; it’s that the system gave them little incentive to do so. All that mattered was that the defendant was dangerous or evil.

  When confronted with their own testimony that was later strongly criticized by experts, Hayne and West often point to other evidence of a suspect’s guilt, or note that the suspect ended up pleading guilty in that case or another. The most likely answer is that it just didn’t matter. Forensic experts existed to help convince juries to send bad people to prison. They were a means to a greater good. Whether or not what they said in court was credible and accurate wasn’t particularly important.

  In the summer of 1991, Levon Brooks was sent to the Mississippi State Hospital in Whitfield for a mental evaluation. The resulting report should have been an additional signal that Brooks didn’t present as the type capable of committing a crime as heinous as the one for which he had been charged. The psychiatrists who evaluated Brooks wrote:

  We found no suggestion of a mental disorder in this man. He received a complete battery of psychological tests and these did not suggest impairment in his intelligence, his personality, or his sexual adjustment. We have gotten no suggestion from family members or his girlfriend that he has had mental trouble in the past, nor have we seen any suggestion of mental problems since he has been here. He has been cooperative, polite, and very pleasant in his interactions with us as well as with other patients and other staff. He has consistently denied commission of the crime.

  The staff also noted that Brooks’s minimal criminal history wasn’t suggestive of a sexual predator. Conscientious law enforcement officials might have taken notice of all of that, particularly when there was another suspect whose criminal history was a much better fit for the crimes. But the system had already decided on Brooks’s guilt. He had already been arrested, jailed, and indicted. The only reason for the mental evaluation was to get a doctor to say Brooks was mentally fit to stand trial—and then to be executed. The report stated that he was. Little else mattered.

  Brooks’s trial began on January 13, 1992. Allgood’s opening statement was brief. He set the scene at the Smith household that evening, and then told jurors about the “silent evil cloaked in the shape of a man” that snatched Courtney from her bedroom. Allgood only had one piece of physical evidence, so he hit it hard. “But the man who did this, ladies and gentlemen, left his mark,” Allgood declared. “He left his mark in the form of some teeth marks embedded on her arm. The State of Mississippi, ladies and gentlemen, is simply going to prove to you that that man… is Levon Brooks.”

  Allgood didn’t even mention Courtney’s sister Ashley, allegedly the only person to witness the abduction. Still, his opening salvo was a confident, direct, no-nonsense condemnation of Levon Brooks. His attorneys might have been prepared with a fiery response. Perhaps they’d point out that the only physical evidence against their client was an unidentifiable mark on her wrist, and that the state’s expert witness was a controversial figure in an already controversial field. Perhaps they’d point out that they’d be calling two witnesses who put their client at the Santa Barbara at the time the crime was committed. They might have also pointed out how many other suspects were arrested for the crime and how all of them were eliminated based solely on the bite mark evidence.

  But they did none of that. Instead, Brooks’s attorneys deferred their opening statement until after the state had rested its case. The jury would sit with Allgood’s accusation for days without a rebuttal.

  The state’s first witness was Ashley Smith, who by the time of the trial had turned seven. The judge questioned her first. In an apparent attempt to get her to appreciate the gravity of the proceedings, the judge told Ashley that she must tell the truth. He asked if she went to church and Sunday school. She said she did. He asked her if she knew about God and the devil. She said she did. He then warned her that if she didn’t tell the truth, she’d “go to the devil.”

  Even under different circumstances, threatening a child with the fires of hell seems a bit out of place for a judge. Given that Ashley had clearly been fed false information by either police investigators or prosecutors, the poor girl must have been terrified. If she even partially realized that Brooks wasn’t the man she saw, or if she knew she hadn’t seen the man well enough to identify him, she had also been told by important men wearing suits and uniforms and badges that he was in fact the man who killed her sister.

  There’s good reason to believe that Ashley’s testimony had been well rehearsed. Her answers at trial were far cleaner and more concise than her interviews with Uncle Bunky. Despite all the time that had passed, her memory seemed to have improved. At trial, Ashley immediately said the man who abducted her sister was named “Titee.” When Allgood asked her how she knew Titee, she quickly answered, “He was my momma boyfriend.”

  Again, in her initial interviews she threw out all sorts of other names and only mentioned “Titee” in the second interview, after Levon Brooks had become a suspect. And according to her own family, Ashley barely knew Brooks and wouldn’t have known his nickname. This was also the first record of her mentioning Brooks’s relationship with her mother.

  The transcript of Ashley’s testimony reads much cleaner than the transcript of her initial interviews. She saw her sister’s abduction. She woke her uncle Tony, who was asleep on the couch, to tell him what happened. Later, everyone realized her sister was gone. The inconsistencies were gone. The wild stories about airplanes, knives, and guns were gone. Nearly everything she had previously said that contradicted the state’s theory of the crime was gone.

  The defense cross-examination of Ashley went much differently. Prather’s cocounsel reminded Ashley that she had told Uncle Bunky that it wasn’t one man who took her sister, but three, and that one of them was white. When asked if the abductor had a stocking on his face, she first replied no, and then “I forgot.” She reaffirmed that one of the men who took Courtney had a son named Travis, and that she and Travis played together “all the time.”

  When asked if she told Uncle Bunky that the man went to college with her mother, she said no, she had never said that. (She had.) The defense then asked Ashley about the other things she had told Uncle Bunky, including that her uncle Tony had grabbed a gun or a knife, that the attackers were eating potato chips, and that the abductor was holding a bag of money. She replied no to all. She maintained she never told Uncle Bunky any of those things.

  It went on like this. Allgood objected a few times, protesting that Brooks’s lawyer was repeating the same questions. He was. The problem was that Ashley wasn’t giving the same answers.

  Allgood must have known how this looked. Ashley’s answers to his questions sounded carefully rehearsed. Her answers to Austin’s questions sounded like a confused and frightened seven-year-old. On redirect, Allgood asked her, “What did I tell you to tell these people?” That question was clearly aimed at reassuring the jury that she hadn’t been coached. Ideally, she’d have answered with something like “nothing” or “only the trut
h.” Instead she replied, “I forgot.”

  Another of Allgood’s attempts to lead Ashley also backfired. Allgood asked, “And this man that you’ve pointed out in the courtroom as Titee, do you believe—do you really believe that he has a boy named Travis?” This is one of the few things Ashley had said from the start, and it pointed away from Levon Brooks. Allgood needed her to walk it back. She didn’t. “Yes,” she replied.

  Ashley Smith simply wasn’t a credible witness, not in her first interview, nor her second, and not at trial. Even if she had actually seen something, she was too young, too scared, too susceptible to influence, and too prone to fantasy to be of value to the investigation, much less to be the only eyewitness at a death penalty trial.

  And yet after each of her interviews—whether with Uncle Bunky, the Noxubee County Sheriff’s Office, or Forrest Allgood—the adults who interviewed her extracted the vague, contradictory, or ambiguous portions of her answers and deployed them to implicate Levon Brooks. A quarter turned into an earring. “Chavon” turned into “Levon,” which turned into “Tie-tee.” (Ashley Smith never even uttered the word “Levon.”) A white man who went to college with her mother turned into a black man who once dated her. The knife she saw her uncle wield at the abductors turned into a gun—and then just disappeared.

  Brooks’s attorneys tried to get the recordings of Ashley’s two interviews with Uncle Bunky introduced into evidence. Perhaps if the jury could hear those tapes for themselves, they might have noted the stark contrasts between her first interview, her second interview, and her trial testimony. But when the judge refused, Brooks’s attorneys’ only choice was to ask Ashley about those interviews and her various contradictory statements in order to make sure the jury heard it all. To the jurors, it must have looked as if they were attacking a seven-year-old girl. And that’s exactly how Allgood would characterize the questioning in his closing argument.

  And yet even for all the ways Ashley Smith’s already bad memory had been contorted and co-opted en route to Brooks’s trial, Allgood’s closing argument took it all a step further.

  “From start to finish,” Allgood told the jury, “the little girl has never identified anybody else as being the man who came into her bedroom and took her sister away except the defendant. Nobody else. Nobody else.… She has said consistently from start to finish this is the guy that took my sister.”

  That wasn’t just wrong. It was brazenly, thoroughly, and indisputably wrong. It’s difficult to see how someone could read the transcripts of the original interviews with Ashley and possibly conclude that her story had never changed. But that’s what Allgood told the jury. Still today, Allgood insists that this is the case. “Ashley ALWAYS said the man who took her sister was known to her and was ‘Tytee,’” Allgood said in a 2017 email interview. “That was the name she had for Brooks. It may or may not be in her initial statement, but she always said that.… Just because it isn’t in a statement doesn’t mean it wasn’t said.”

  Steven Hayne took the stand a couple days into Brooks’s trial. Allgood walked through Hayne’s qualifications and then tendered him as an expert in the field of forensic pathology. The judge asked Prather if he had any objections. He didn’t. The defense made no effort to question Hayne’s credibility or qualifications.

  Hayne’s testimony was pretty straightforward. He said that Courtney Smith likely died of freshwater drowning. She also had other injuries, including bruises on her head and lacerations on the inside of her vagina.

  Hayne then testified that he found marks on Courtney’s wrist that he believed were left by human teeth. He called in Michael West, who concurred. Hayne also testified he believed the bite was inflicted at the time of death or shortly thereafter, meaning that whoever inflicted it was likely the same person who killed the girl.

  Both of these conclusions were problematic. West would later say that the alleged bite marks on Smith’s body were only made by a couple of Brooks’s upper teeth. These weren’t what one might normally picture a bite mark to look like—two arching series of wounds in the shape of a human mouth. They were tiny marks and could have been left by any number of things. Experts who have since reviewed Hayne’s autopsy in the case have said it would have been nearly impossible to tell in a body that had been submerged in water as long as Courtney’s whether the marks on her body were made before or after her death, much less whether they were made by human teeth.

  Because Hayne wasn’t the one who implicated Brooks, Hayne’s defenders have sometimes claimed that his role in Brooks’s conviction was minor and shouldn’t cast doubt on his general credibility. But that overlooks these mistakes, as well as others, such as Hayne allowing West to excise the skin around the marks. It also overlooks the history between the two men. Hayne didn’t merely bring West on as a consultant and then turn the analysis over to him; he deferred to West in his report. The two were essentially in business together. They advertised themselves to law enforcement agencies in two states. The process they used to tie Brooks to Courtney Smith’s murder had become their modus operandi: Hayne would find suspicious marks, conclude they were bite marks, and then bring West in to “match” them to the chief suspect. It’s a process they had repeated before, and would repeat over and over again.

  During cross-examination, Hayne told Prather that he had assembled a sexual assault kit for Courtney Smith. Hayne was unable to collect any semen or pubic hairs that could be tested for DNA, though he would only say on the stand that he “didn’t know” if the crime lab was able to test anything in the kit. Investigators did find male hairs on a blanket, including a male pubic hair that did not belong to anyone in Courtney Smith’s family. It also didn’t belong to Levon Brooks. Again, this left the bite marks as the only physical evidence tying Brooks to the crime scene.

  There was one especially odd moment in Hayne’s testimony, though more for Allgood than for Hayne. After Hayne described the cuts in the victim’s vagina, Allgood asked what could have caused them. Hayne speculated that it could have been a finger or a penis. Allgood then interjected, seemingly from nowhere, “A broom handle for example?”

  Allgood would return to the broom handle in his redirect of Hayne, and then again in his closing argument. It isn’t clear where this came from, or why Allgood brought it up. It was an oddly specific reference, yet there was no broom found near the crime scene, and no broom handle was ever entered into evidence. We also now know how the crime happened. It didn’t involve a broom.

  A conscientious medical examiner should have responded that while, yes, it is possible that the injuries could have been created with a broom handle, there was no evidence favoring that over a finger, a penis, or any other narrow, bluntly pointed object. But Hayne simply agreed with Allgood. Yes, a broom handle was possible.

  Allgood was engaging in a particularly devious rhetorical device, here. Visualization can be incredibly persuasive. The more a prosecutor can get a jury to visualize the defendant committing the crime, the easier it becomes to convince them that he’s the culprit. One way to help them visualize the defendant committing the crime is to provide lots of detail. Particularly striking, powerful, or emotional details are especially effective. Allgood knew the jury would be told that there was no semen found in the victim. So getting them to visualize Brooks raping the girl would be difficult. But Brooks, a grown man, raping a small girl with a broom handle? That’s a powerfully horrifying image.

  Steven Hayne later billed Noxubee County $1,950 for his testimony.

  A couple of nights before his testimony, Michael West walked into Roses, a local discount mart. He picked up two packs of cigarettes, a bag of Skittles, mounting tape, tack glides, and a Wispy Walker, a near-life-size doll of a little girl that he’d use in a demonstration for the jury.

  West took the stand on January 16, day four of the trial. Allgood had made it clear early on that West would be a critical part of his case. In November 1991, he sent Prather a copy of West’s incredibly long CV, along with some purport
edly friendly professional advice: “I wouldn’t challenge his qualifications.”

  Prather didn’t try to get West disqualified before trial, but he did manage to get some funds to hire his own expert. That expert, Dr. Harry Mincer of Knoxville, Tennessee, had testified against West in other cases, but he wasn’t a bite mark skeptic. He was a practitioner. He would prove to be almost as damaging to Levon Brooks as Michael West.

  Allgood began by running through West’s qualifications. West told Allgood he held the position of “senior crime scene analyst.” He noted that he had been on The Phil Donahue Show and had testified in thirteen states, and then he named each one. He then ran off the various places where he claimed to have lectured or taught courses on “bite marks or ultraviolet light.” He ended, as he often did, with “the FBI academy in Quantico, Virginia.”

  When it was his turn to ask West about his qualifications, Prather asked just one: whether the American Dental Association recognized the field of forensic odontology as a specialty. West said that it did not. When Allgood followed up, West explained that the ADA only allowed dentists to specialize in one area. So he was glad that forensic odontology wasn’t one of those areas, or he’d have to choose between forensics and his dental practice.